The Quest for More Flexible Rack-Level Architectures

Server technology doesn’t inspire much conversation around the IT water cooler these days. With Flash technology taking over the storage farm and network infrastructure about to be “software defined,” it seems that plain old servers, even virtualized ones, just aren’t exciting anymore.

As for the racks themselves, a consensus is growing among data center managers that it is high time for a redesign. As Datacenter Dynamics found out in a recent survey, complaints range from a lack of standard sizing to inadequate power distribution to poor access to cabling. As the enterprise strives to bring legacy infrastructure to 21st Century standards, flexibility is likely to be a primary requirement, particularly among cloud and colocation providers. It is well-known that as server density increases, so does power density, and the last thing the CIO wants to hear is that data loads can’t be met because existing racks can’t handle it.

Conventional wisdom holds that the major advances in data agility and performance will come through software-defined architectures. This may be true now that true virtual networking has severed the last link between data environments and underlying hardware. But it is also true that the staid physical infrastructure that served the enterprise for so long in the past needs to loosen up quite a bit if existing data centers are to remain relevant in the cloud era.

At some point, data and applications need to find homes in the physical world, and the more accommodating the data center can be to dynamic workload environments, the more the enterprise will benefit from its hardware investment.